Then I took a pencil and traced the strokes of color in the painting. Afterwards, the canvas looked like a giant paint-by-numbers kit. Here’s one part of the traced results:

The tracing was a little too detailed, as it turns out. If I were doing it again I wouldn’t be as meticulous. I bought an acrylic painting set at the local craft store and spent a couple hours over a couple days painting my version of the The Scream. Here it is side-by-side with the real thing:

The idea behind this costume is to make the painting three-dimensional. So I cut up my painting so I could stick my head through it. Here’s what the quick-and-dirty test looked like:

It looked about right! So now it was time for… drumroll… the face paint! My first instinct was to make my entire face green like The Hulk. But my wife was nice enough to apply the face paint so that it actually mirrored the paint strokes for the person in the painting. And that’s how you get a Halloween version of The Scream:

We took a bunch of photos, so I’ll include an animated version too:

Overall, I’m happy with how my 2014 Halloweencostumeideas turned out. Other than The Scream, all the prototypes were quick and easy (under 15 minutes and under $15). A couple of the ideas were silly, but I had fun getting creative, painting a little bit, and tinkering with my projector.

I already talked about using a projector to prototype a Halloween costume. One Halloween idea that worked out better than I expected was Jack Nicholson from The Shining. Remember the scene when Jack axes his way through a door, announcing “Here’s Johnny!”? It looked like this in the movie:

I started by letting some stubble grow out, and on the day I took the picture, I left my hair messy. I also ordered a plastic axe.

It turns out that this picture was perfect for a long canvas I had. I used Pixlr to edit Jack out. In a quick test, it looked like this:

That’s when I realized for a light projector, you want to edit out with white, not black. A little more work and I was quite happy with the results:

Let me tell you, it only got more creepy from there:

Oh, did I forget my axe? Let’s bring that into the scene:

I didn’t bother to paint or print out anything for the canvas, but overall, it was fun to play with a potential Shining costume for a little while:

I was also thinking about canvases. You can buy a cheap canvas at local craft stores for $10 or so. I was thinking: wouldn’t it be neat to paint a reproduction of a famous artwork, and then stick your head through a hole in the canvas? You could paint your face to match the painting, and voilà–there’s your costume!

You can find all kinds of great work where photographs look like paintings, and sticking my head through some great art sounded fun. For example, I just found this post with some people that had a similar idea.

And *then* I started to think about projectors. You can do some amazing things by projecting light–check out this crazy video for example. A projector can be a quick way to prototype an idea.

So I played around with different artwork. I’ll post a teaser today, with more to come in the next couple days. We already know that I can put on cat makeup, so I bought a stock photo of a kitten hanging from a rope. It looked like this:

Ultimately, you’d either paint the kitten on the canvas or just print the picture out on a color printer and attach it to the canvas. For an added effect, you could have bits of rope sticking out from the canvas to match the photo.

When I projected it on a canvas, it looked like this:

Kind of disturbing, I know. Yes, I’m wearing some cat ears. But it was just prototyping an idea. In the end, I decided not to go with the “Hang in There” kitten. But as we’ll see, the projector came in very handy later.

In the past for Halloween, I’ve often dressed up as internet memes (Rick Astley, anyone?) or topical things from the news (like Matt/Mitt Romney). This year I was running dry on ideas until a few days before Halloween. Then I started to think about famous artwork–more on that in a future Halloween post.

One idea that I prototyped was Rene Magritte’s Son of Man painting. It’s easy, fast, and cheap:

All it takes is a novelty bowler (~$8) and a plastic apple (~$1.50, although you might have to buy a pack of six). Assuming you already have a suit and can borrow a red tie, you’re good to go for only $15 or so.

This year I got into Halloween, so I may post a few more Halloween ideas that I played with in the coming days.